She sank back, and I saw her face no more. A policeman shouted an angry order. The carriage moved away. At the window her hand fluttered in a last weak gesture. Then, even the window grew blank. I was alone, standing with head uncovered, in the midst of a group of urchins, who were mocking my long face.
PART III
I
The rest is a blur. Clear and definite as is every moment from my first meeting with Bernoline to the last faint flutter of her white hand, the rest of the day is confused. There are hours which are lost, during which I do not know what I did or where I wandered. The great city roared about me. I walked interminable miles along dark, echoing side streets and into sudden flaming thoroughfares, where rapid crowds descended upon me like gusts of wind. I can remember the tap-tap of my cane along some stony solitude, and again standing at Times Square, in a wilderness of lights, roared at, amid the clanging and the honking of traffic; crowded, jostled, buffeted in the polygot stream,—a stranger in the land of his fathers.
Those crowds—those hostile, unintelligible crowds, so triumphantly successful—shall I ever forget them! I had known the monastic multitudes of Paris, slow-moving, reticent, respectful of the black-garbed mourners, compassionate and grim, hiding neither their sorrows nor their sympathy. I had known them and felt at home in them. But this other thing; this strident influx of strange tongues, this pagan riot, this shrill pursuit of pleasure, when all the world was hushed and apprehensive! What did they understand? What could they be made to understand? I stood, bewildered—I who had come for my American heritage—more alone, more distant than when in the long days of convalescence the dread feeling of homesickness gripped my heart.
If this were America, it was the America that Peter Magnus saw, polygot, cosmopolitan, international, an America that might be roaring on to some greater world-significance, but an America that had left me behind.
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